A new agreement that expands the collaboration among Arab Open University (AOU), McGraw-Hill Education and Growmore will make McGraw-Hill's high quality digital content available to students at AOU's nine branches in the Middle East and Africa. Students in all major first- and second-year course areas will gain access to McGraw-Hill Connect® digital course materials.

Learning science company McGraw-Hill and Arab Open University have a longstanding relationship, having worked together in recent years towards the digital transition of the university. The two organisations have now decided to take a step further with a three-year agreement. McGraw-Hill will not only supply customised McGraw-Hill Connect materials specially designed to meet the needs of AOU's instructors and students, but will also act as a strategic partner in AOU's marketing and social responsibility initiatives.

McGraw-Hill Connect uses adaptive technology to personalise the learning experience for students and help instructors become even more effective. It is used by millions of students globally, and gives educators the flexibility to teach their course their way, while providing students with affordable, engaging products that help them achieve learning outcomes.

Growmore, which is McGraw-Hill's exclusive distributor in Kuwait, is amongst the largest learning solutions providers in the region with 14 campus bookstores serving federal and private higher education institutions.

Journals using Scholastica Open Access Publishing can now have their articles automatically deposited into the Portico digital preservation service.

One of the most important steps that online journals should take to ensure that readers will always have access to their scholarship, even if the journal is discontinued or its website is compromised, is to deposit all articles into a digital preservation service. Creating the XML and properly organising and naming content files so that they are formatted for ingestion by preservation services can be time consuming and require technical knowledge that many journal editors and publishers do not have.

Journals that use Portico can now request to have their Scholastica and Portico accounts connected so that all of the articles they publish via Scholastica are deposited into Portico. Any time journals update an article Scholastica will also automatically deposit the new version into Portico, so the archive always has the latest content. Scholastica will take care of formatting the articles for ingestion into Portico. The journal's content will be therefore be added to the archive with no work on the part of the editors.

Cengage, an education and technology company, has announced that the University of Missouri System will be offering Cengage Unlimited subscriptions to all students enrolled in Cengage courses beginning in January 2019. Cengage provides course materials to 11 million of the 20 million students pursuing higher education.

Cengage Unlimited provides students unlimited access to more than 22,000 digital course materials, including eBooks, online homework access codes and study guides, for one price. Approximately 40,000 University of Missouri students taking Cengage courses will be able to access course materials across 70 subjects and 675 courses, with subscription costs included in student course fees.

The subscription will save the average University of Missouri student $75 or more each semester, depending on the number of Cengage courses they take. Across the University system, the agreement will save students $3 million annually.

In June 2018, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) charged a task force to look at Wikidata. The task force emerged from several years of discussion between ARL and the Wikimedia Foundation on where the two communities can effectively collaborate. The focus on Wikidata and Wikibase came from two points of alignment in particular: interest in linked open data for both library discovery systems and Wikipedia, and advancing a diversity and inclusion agenda in the cultures of both libraries and Wikimedia.

In practice, this meant focusing on Wikidata as a potential repository for libraries' linked open data, and that a significant use case driving the formation of the task force was a mutual interest between libraries and the Wikimedia community in creating culturally competent descriptive metadata, in collaboration with communities whose lives, collections, and relationships are being described. When the task force was convened, it became clear that Wikibase (the infrastructure) and Wikidata (the community) should also be explored explicitly in the context of ARL's commitment to open, equitable, and inclusive scholarly communication.

Non-profit global library cooperative OCLC and Atlas Systems have a long-standing partnership, and both companies are focused on putting library needs first. As a result, in addition to continuing the rapid development of Tipasa, the industry's first cloud-based ILL management system, OCLC and Atlas Systems have decided to continue to develop ILLiad for the library community.

Tipasa will continue to evolve to meet the needs of more and more of the community, with the goal of becoming the preferred solution for ILL workflow management.

Atlas will also continue to provide periodic updates to the ILLiad software. ILLiad 9.0, which is scheduled for release on November 26, 2018, will include: Security Enhancements: FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) can now be enabled; Password changes for basic authentication and staff passwords include updated hashing, expiration, and complexity options; Patrons using basic authentication (and staff) will be prompted to update their password upon login after ILLiad 9.0 update; SymphonyAPI authentication is now available for ILLiad authentication using SIRSI Symphony; New look and feel for the ILLiad client with choices for additional interface styles; and Many bug fixes.